1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to techniques of automatically selecting a factor (e.g., a demographic attribute, a demographic criterion, a demographic class) for use in estimating characteristics of viewers (i.e., an audience) who are viewing the same content (e.g., broadcast content, Web content).
The invention relates more specifically to techniques that can be implemented in an exemplary environment in which a user equipment (e.g., a mobile terminal, a PC (Personal Computer)) can receive and visualize the same shared content that has been distributed to other viewers (e.g., an unspecified large number of other viewers), and can receive and visualize comments that have been published or posted by the other viewers.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, it has become more popular that various kinds of shared content are distributed via a global network such as the Internet to the users. Such shared content, which includes, for example, television broadcasts, and various kinds of media content such as Web pages, music content, visual or video content, and e-books, refers to content accessible from users.
Such shared content is epitomized by broadcast content which is formatted to include not only audiovisual information which serves as a broadcast program, but also various sets of additional information useful to users. Notably, a set of such additional information is textual information including, for example, subtitles, captions and the like, which is displayed to viewers in synchronization with the audiovisual information, while helping the viewers in understanding the context of the broadcast program that the viewers are viewing.
Typically, such textual information is prepared for summarizing the context of the broadcast program, using a short message, document or text. To this end, the short message is made up with words selected to concisely the context of the audiovisual information. Because of this, analysis of frequencies with which important words or keywords appear in the short message would be helpful in successful interpretation of the context of the broadcast program.
On the other hand, a growing number of users (e.g., an unspecified large number of other viewers) publish or post a growing number of comments via the Internet to sites such as a blog (Web log) site, a mini blog site (e.g., Twitter (registered trademark)) or the like. Such comments are featured in that they tend to share the same topic or subject. One example of such shared topic can is shared content distributed to users, one example of which can be broadcast television content (e.g., broadcast television programs).
While viewing shared content such as broadcast content, users can discuss the context of the broadcast content with other viewers, through, for example, a mini blog site. Notably, it is a growing viewing style that users, while viewing a television broadcast (e.g., a live broadcast program of a professional baseball game), post their comments on the context of the television broadcast (e.g., cheering or criticizing messages on the baseball game). This viewing style helps each individual user to feel that he or she, when viewing, shares the same content with other viewers.
There is a known technique regarding such a communication service. By this technique, distinctive keywords are automatically extracted from a text part (e.g., subtitles, captions) of broadcast television content, an Web page containing a text using the same words as the extracted keywords is retrieved from an associated Web site, and the retrieved Web page is presented to a user. This is disclosed in, for example, Japanese Patent Application Publication Nos. 2010-087658 and 2008-048297, the contents of which are incorporated herein by reference in their entirety.
There is another known technique of estimating a blogger profile (i.e., a collection of personal data associated to a specific user or individual bearing some attributes) by analyzing text data which is authored and posted to a blog site by the blogger. This technique enables estimation of a blogger profile based on an unspecified factor or a set of unspecified attributes. This is disclosed in Article “Scalable and General Method to Estimate Blogger Profile” co-authored by Tsutomu OHKURA, Nobuyuki SHIMIZU, and Hiroshi NAKAGAWA, Sep. 25, 2007, Information Processing Society in Japan, Natural Language, Special Interest Group, Technical Report 2007 (94), pp. 1-5, the content of which is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.